Jill Of All Trades

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30919, 27 November 1965, Page 4

Jill Of All Trades

Jobbing Along. By Esther James. Whitcombe and Tombs. 182 pp.

As a chronicler of personal achievements Esther James is painstakingly thorough. The daughter of a Scottish engineer, whose wife was a descendant of an intrepid British general, Esther was one of ten children brought up on a Taranaki farm. The children were required by their stern father to run the farm themselves without receiving wages, and the author's eccentric career in the pursuit of elusive wealth began when she was five years old and received pennies for holding a gate open. Fired with ambition, Esther James strove after financial rewards from then onwards, and achieved them in a bewildering succession of jobs. She first burst upon the New Zealand consciousness in 1932, when she walked from Spirits Bay to the southernmost point of Stewart Island, as an ambulatory advertisement for New Zealand clothes. The stretch south from Christchurch to Ashburton under a broiling sun almost cracked her nerve, but she fulfilled her mission with no further concessions to feminine weakness. The following year she went to Australia, where she walked from Melbourne to Brisbane, and before returning to New Zealand had mined a few fairly valuable opals, descended to the seabed in a diving suit in search of coral, and killed a large crocodile by a crude but ingenious device of her own invention.

Three years’ work in an Auckland architect’s office was to be of inestimable value to her in her next sphere of activity which was the building of her own house with

concrete blocks of her own making. This was a wartime operation for, having married and produced two children, she was unable to support the latter on the separation allowance granted to her husband by the army. Her building feat was undertaken in a remote seaside settlement north of Auckland, and she was watched daily by a kind of Greek Chorus in the shape of three old men (occasionally reinforced by their wives) who upbraided her for exposing her innocent children to the rigours of life in a tent (her only home at the time), and chanted awful predictions concerning the inevitable failure of the enterprise. Notwithstanding this diurnal annoyance she managed to keep her progeny alive, and, with the aid of an admiring builder, to put the finishing touches to her home-made residence.

Much greater triumphs were to follow in the shape of real-estate deals, which she tackled with the inflexible purpose of a pocket-battleship ploughing into an enemy fleet. These were in connexion with a sub-division of sections in Remuera, and once again her building operations were on the do-it-yourself principle. In the midst of them she fell 11 feet from a ladder during a third pregnancy, but produced the child—a daughter —without mishap. In her spare time she patented a few inventions. To crown this somewhat busy life Esther James bought one of Auckland’s small and select volcanoes which she managed to dispose of, in her own inimitable way, at a handsome profit. It is a pity that her own activities have left no room in this narrative for personal relationships. After the birth of her third child she apparently mislaid the other two, for she never mentions them again; neither do any details of her family life at the end of the war emerge for our sympathetic perusal. On the strength of such a well-documented account of her own exploits, however, one feels that a rosy future could still be opening up for the author in the sphere of high-pressure advertising.